RedEye Columnist Pens 'Tales of Iceland'

By Melissa Wiley in Arts & Entertainment on May 7, 2013 4:45PM

No one thinks of ice when they think Iceland. They think girls. They envision full-on phalanxes of supermodels serving up Big Macs and fries, as Quentin Tarantino once raved to Conan O’Brien. So when RedEye columnist Stephen Markley had the opportunity to visit the world’s leggiest McDonald’s, he took it.

In Tales of Iceland, Markley does more, however, than ogle the ladies. He sets out to see everything he can in the permanent daylight while giving his own personal credo—“be open to pretty much everything except crystal meth, bestiality, and olives"—free reign and leaving conventional guidebook wisdom in the Blue Lagoon.

Markley’s tone forcibly defies neutrality, the echoless voice he sees pervading the genre.

“I like being able to interview glacier researchers and also say the word ‘fuck’ 14 times a page and not worry about what audience I might be offending or boring,” he avers. “Because that's what traveling is. You have these moments of clarity and purpose and serenity, but you're also making masturbation jokes with your friends for the five hours you're on the road with nothing to do. Basically, I wanted to write something that I'd want to read if I were going to Iceland for the first time.”

Markley, whose previous titles include the meta-publishing memoir Publish This Book, partnered with startup publisher GiveLiveExplore to pioneer a new kind of travel literature, one where points A and B are incidental to what happens in between and where what happens there makes you forget about the start and endpoints altogether. “Most guidebooks are static and stale,” states Matthew Trinetti, founder of GiveLiveExplore. “Tales of Iceland is actually fun to read and arguably more educational than guidebooks.”

Highlights of Markley’s temporary vagabondage include encounters of a drunk and raging Kiefer Sutherland, hikes across desolate, pristine glaciers featured in Game of Thrones, a tour of elfin abodes, and an interview with Jón Gnarr, Reykjavik’s actor-comedian mayor. The book’s most memorable adventures successfully marry anecdote with insight into Icelandic culture. And Markley’s not shy about drawing comparisons with our own.

Referring to the legendary Huldufólk, he muses, “We heard a whole slew of stories involving Icelandic city planning councils consulting with psychics so they wouldn't inadvertently build on the homes of hidden people. It's not that the Icelandic all believe in elves, but they're not exactly willing to test the notion. The elves sort of serve as an avatar for a certain reverence for the natural world, which frankly Americans could use in much greater abundance. As far as I'm concerned, believing in elves is way saner than believing in whatever the major religions of the world are selling.”

Where traditional guidebooks would list Huldufólk tour dates and locales and be done with it, moving onto B&B options, Tales of Iceland embraces Markley’s stark subjectivity, his signature cynicism as well as his wonder. Discussing the writing process, he says, “It's a slipshod book, and it's intended to be that way. David Foster Wallace once said that writing is the most narcissistic art form because you're just one guy or gal trying to impress your consciousness on another person. I like to just own that and assume that I can convince the reader to follow my weird train of thought wherever it might go.”

It’s a train you want to keep riding, in part because of people like Jón Gnarr, who seem to embody Iceland’s mysterious core as well as its resilience in the wake of recent financial disaster. Of his time with the mayor, Markley says, “He'd run entirely as a joke and here he was facing the bankruptcy of the capital city. But it's interesting because even though Gnarr and I were separated by whatever cultural gulf we had, I felt a strong affinity with him immediately. His sense of humor—calling the CIA to ask if they'd found his wallet, refusing to form a coalition government with anyone who hadn't seen all five seasons of The Wire, being a total lefty while ridiculing Marxist dogma with his movie character—this is exactly the kind of shit that makes me laugh.”

Markley and GiveLiveExplore are banking on that laughter for the series’ longevity. Speaking to his interest in writing another book in this same vein, he enthuses, “There's definitely an audience out there for travel lit, and frankly the freedom I had with this project could never be replicated at a bigger corporate publisher. I just think there's something to be said for constant experimentation, especially if you're an artist and especially if you're a writer. But yeah, it's a big fucking world, and basically corner of it fascinates me.”

Tales of Iceland is available as an ebook for $5.99 at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and in paperback for $9.99 at CreateSpace.